He came on the scene before the clock had struck nine in the morning and fifteen minutes later he had disappeared. The shake-up that Carles Puigdemont gave Catalan politics on Thursday lasted the same amount of time as a break. Arriving, having his photo taken and leaving again. Puigdemont reappeared in Barcelona, six years and ten months after having fled to Belgium to evade justice. He briefly dipped into the crowd before hiding again. A specialist in trying to challenge the law and the institutions of the State, his latest caper undermines the credibility of the pillars of Catalan institutions: the Mossos d’Esquadra and the Generalitat itself. His party tried to alter the rhythm of the Parliament.
He former president He burst into the pre-investment session of Salvador Illa and deployed a preconceived plan to monopolise the day’s limelight. It was not because of the content of his speech, brief and well-known, but because of his sudden disappearance in the middle of an event in the centre of Barcelona where the Guardia Urbana counted more than 3,000 people. Junts claimed that there were 10,500. On the same street where the headquarters of the Superior Court of Justice (TSJ), the highest judicial authority in Catalonia, is located, Puigdemont went up on a stage, spoke to his followers, received a standing ovation and disappeared getting into a white car.
Carles Puigdemont has repeatedly said that he feels offended when it is said that, in 2017, he left Catalonia hidden in the trunk of a car. former president He stresses that the story is not true and maintains that he headed for Belgium sitting in a conventional manner inside the vehicle. In his account, Puigdemont adds that he was dressed in presidentin a suit and with the institutional pin on his lapel. This Thursday, the leader of Junts wrote another chapter of his escapades by car: he slipped away from the crowd that had just cheered him, got into a white Honda that he had parked next to the Arc de Triomf in Barcelona and managed to disappear from what had been announced as a “police shield” in the vicinity of the Parliament. “Today I have come to remind you that we are still here, because we have no right to resign,” he said in his brief speech. “They have been chasing us for seven years,” he said, and then he vanished. The delegation of Junts deputies walked the path to the Ciutadella park, the seat of the Parliament. There was Eduard Sallent, chief commissioner of the Mossos. The idea was for the information station to carry out Puigdemont’s arrest without too much fuss. Sallent saw the Junts group march by, but with no trace of the former president.
“The first part of the plan has gone well,” commented a source close to the Junts leadership. Later, in the investiture debate, the party demanded the suspension of the plenary session, calling it “intolerable” that the Mossos had reacted by activating an operation Jaula to catch Puigdemont “as if he were a terrorist,” criticised the parliamentary spokesperson for JxCat, Mònica Sales. Late on Thursday, his lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, assured TV3 that Puigdemont “has gone home, where he has his workplace,” after his return, although without specifying whether he was referring to the address where he has lived for almost seven years in Belgium and stated that Puigdemont “will never give himself up.”
Only the closest environment of the former president Puigdemont knew the details of the return. He travelled days before the plenary session and managed to remain unnoticed. On Wednesday, when he was supposedly already in Catalonia, he published a video stating that he had “undertaken the return trip from exile”. This Thursday morning, the Junts deputies gathered on a sidewalk on Trafalgar Street, a short distance from the stage that had been set up at the Arc de Triomphe. Before nine o’clock, Puigdemont appeared. He walked quickly, and was accompanied by the general secretary of Junts, Jordi Turull, who was carrying a backpack, and two middle-aged men who pretended to act as bodyguards. In a sort of rugby scrum, the Junts group quickly surrounded the former president. At his side were Josep Rull, president of the Parliament; Albert Batet, president of the parliamentary group; Josep Rius, spokesman for JxCat and the lawyer Boye. They led him, opening the way through the crowd, to the foot of the stage. Puigdemont, dressed in a jacket and tie, completed the last few metres at a trot.
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The return of the Junts leader was a commitment that he himself had made during his electoral campaign to run for the presidency of the Generalitat. Confident that there would be no legal obstacles to the application of the amnesty law, Puigdemont announced that his return was scheduled for after the elections of May 12, and specified that it did not matter whether the investiture served to do so. president to him or not. He lost the elections and the subsequent pact between ERC and the PSC brought Salvador Illa closer to the Generalitat. Puigdemont reacted by reproaching Esquerra for the agreement, and specifying that speeding up the investiture would lead to his being arrested “in a few days”. This Thursday, in the centre of Barcelona, Puigdemont insisted on a prediction that for the moment has failed: “today many will celebrate my arrest”.
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